The "It Took Me 73 Years To Learn This!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading post after post about the chemical element Radium.  When I was a junior in high school I took a course called Chemistry; big mistake!  My teacher's name was Mr. Livengood and I earned a "D".  When I began college at Millersville State Teachers College I was assigned a course called Chemistry; another big mistake.  My teacher's name was Dr. McIlwaine and I earned an "F".  I had to take it over and the second time Dr. McIlwaine gave me an "F".  If it hadn't been for those courses I would have had a fantastic QPA at graduation.  About the only thing I learned in those three courses was the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Oh, by the way, my college advisor was kind and allowed me to pick up that chemistry credit by taking Bowling 101.  I bowled three times a week for a semester and didn't learn a thing about chemistry ... but I did bowl a 209!!  Anyway, during the past eight years while writing this blog I have been reading more and more as well as exploring more and more and I have learned more chemistry than ever before.  

The "Radium Girls" working on clock faces.

I did know (really) about Pierre and Marie Curie discovering the element Radium-226 in 1898 and both being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, but I had never heard of the "Radium Girls" until recently when I was looking at photos of my mom working on the assembly line at Hamilton Watch Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania putting watches together.  Lucky for her she wasn't born 20 years earlier or she might have been part of the radium-infused paint crew that used fine point brushes to paint the dials of watches with radium paint.  

Another young girl works on a clock face with paintbrush.

It was in 1917, when the U.S. was drawn into WWI in Germany, that many girls began working on the assembly line.  They considered themself lucky, since the pay was three times the average working girls' wage.  Day after day during the remainder of WWI, as well as many years after the war ended, the "Radium Girls" painted military and civilian watches and dials, licking their paintbrushes to gain a better point, and handling jars of radium tincture.  Naturally, the paint got all over the girls whose clothes and skin would glow when they got home from work.  

An add for radium water.  Click to read it.

They also used the paint to paint their nails, sprinkle flakes of the stuff in their hair and applied to their teeth to "give their kiss a pop."  They were told by their supervisors that they were perfectly safe.  Pretty hard to believe today.  But, that's not all.  At the time Radium was placed in drinking water, used to cure arthritis and impotence,  put in chocolate candy bars made with radium water,  placed in a toy known as a Radiumscope which would glow at night, placed in toothpaste, was an ingredient in the popular Tho-Radia brand of cosmetics that brightened the skin, placed in heating pads and suppositories used to treat rheumatism, used in health spas where men and women soaked in radium mud and used radium cream as well as being used on the faces of clocks as luminous paint.  

An add for toothpaste with radium.

So what happened to these "Radium Girls".  Well, in January of 1922 one of the "Radium Girls" got a toothache and went to the dentist.  She was told a molar needed to come out.  A few weeks later she had to the tooth next to it removed.  Neither wound healed and seeped blood into her mouth.  More teeth came out and finally the doctor, when examining her, had her jaw crumble in his fingertips like ashes in a fireplace.  The next summer the girl's jaw and her inner ear were removed.  The tumor in her mouth finally cut into her jugular vein and flooded her throat with blood, choking her to death.  By 1924 dozens of "Radium Girls" were sick or dead and a study established that the radioactive paint was what did it.  

The results as seen on this "Radium Girl"

The United States Radium Company, who was responsible for all these girls working without proper security measures in place, had their own study done which said that swallowing radioactive paint is good for you!  They were eventually driven into ruin by the medical community and court costs.  But, it was too late for most of the young "Radium Girls" who died young, usually in horrible pain and fear, while others lived many years with weakened bones, lost teeth and various forms of cancer.  The last "Radium Girl" died at the age of 104 in 2015.  She was one of the lucky ones.  As for me, I have never claimed to know much about chemistry and was lucky not to live in an era when radium was supposed to have cured arthritis or I may have tried it.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.